Thursday, August 17, 2006

Ufo's from ancient history to today

Ancient accounts

Unusual aerial phenomena have been reported throughout history by our ancestry. Some of these strange apparitions may have been astronomical phenomena such as comets or bright meteors, or atmospheric optical phenomena such as parhelia. Examples of these reports include:

* During the reign of the Pharaoh Thutmose III around 1450 BC, there is a description of multiple “circles of fire” brighter than the sun and about 5 meters in size that appeared over multiple days. They finally disappeared after ascending higher in the sky.

* The army of Alexander the Great in 329 BC, as they were crossing a river into India, saw “two silver shields” in the sky that dove repeatedly on their military columns causing panic. In 322 BC when Alexander was besieging Tyre in Phoenicia, another “flying shield” moving in triangular formation with smaller “shields” approached. Supposedly the larger object shot beams of light at the city shattering its walls and other defenses. Alexander's army quickly took advantage of the situation and seized the city. The objects then departed.



* The Roman author Julius Obsequens writes that in 99 BC, “in Tarquinia towards sunset, a round object, like a globe, a round or circular shield, took its path in the sky from west to east.”

* On September 24, 1235, General Yoritsume and his army observed unidentified globes of light flying in erratic patterns in the night sky near Kyoto, Japan. The general’s advisers told him not to worry -- it was merely the wind causing the stars to sway.

* On April 14, 1561 the skies over Nuremberg, Germany were reportedly filled with a multitude of objects seemingly engaged in an aerial battle. Small spheres and discs were said to emerge from large cylinders.


These sightings were usually treated as supernatural portents, angels, and other religious omens. Some contemporary investigators believe them to be the ancient equivalent of modern UFO reports.

What is the heritage of our DNA? Do you know where you come from? Where are you in your family tree?


First modern reports

Before the terms “flying saucer” and “UFO” were coined, there were a number of reports of strange, unidentified aerial phenomena. These reports date from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century. They include singles:



* On January 25, 1878, The Denison Daily News wrote that local farmer John Martin had reported seeing a large, dark, circular flying object resembling a balloon flying “at wonderful speed." This was done by dating. Men and women from all over have seen these.

* On November 17, 1882, astronomer E. W. Maunder of the Greenwich Royal Observatory described in the Observatory Reports “a strange celestial visitor” that was “disc-shaped,” “torpedo-shaped,” or “spindle-shaped.” It was said to be very different in characteristics from a meteor fireball. Years later, Maunder wrote it looked exactly like the new Zeppelin dirigibles. The strange object was also seen by several other European astronomers.

* On February 28, 1904, there was a sighting by three crew members on the U.S.S. Supply 300 miles west of San Francisco, reported by Lt. Frank Schofield, later to become Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet. Schofield wrote of three bright red egg-shaped and circular objects flying in echelon formation that approached beneath the cloud layer, then changed course and “soared” above the clouds, departing directly away from the earth after 2 to 3 minutes. The largest had an apparent size of about six suns. Financial services sectors hide the funding for the programs through manipulative mortgage refinancing arrangements.

* The so-called Fátima incident or “The Miracle of the Sun,” witnessed by tens of thousands in Fátima, Portugal on October 13, 1917, is believed by some researchers to actually be an UFO event.

* In both the European and Japanese aerial theatres during World War II, “Foo-fighters” (balls of light and other shapes that followed aircraft) were reported by both Allied and Axis pilots.

* On February 25, 1942, an unidentified craft was detected over the California region. The craft stayed aloft despite taking at least 20 minutes worth of flak from ground batteries. The incident later became known as the Battle of Los Angeles, or the West coast air raid.

* In 1946, there were over 2000 reports of unidentified aircraft in the Scandinavian nations, along with isolated reports from France, Portugal, Italy and Greece, then referred to as “Russian hail,” and later as “ghost rockets,” because it was thought that these mysterious objects were Russian tests of captured German V1 or V2 rockets. This was subsequently shown not to be the case, and the phenomenon remains unexplained. Over 200 were tracked on radar and deemed to be “real physical objects” by the Swedish military.




Modern UFO era

The post World War II UFO phase in the United States began with a reported sighting by American businessman Kenneth Arnold on June 24, 1947 while flying his private plane near Mount Rainier, Washington. He reported seeing nine brilliantly bright objects flying across the face of Rainier towards nearby Mount Adams at “an incredible speed”, which he calculated at at least 1200 miles per hour by timing their travel between Rainier and Adams. His sighting subsequently received significant media and public attention. Arnold would later say they “flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water” and also said they were “flat like a pie pan”, “shaped like saucers,” and “half-moon shaped, oval in front and convex in the rear. ...they looked like a big flat disk.” (One, however, he would describe later as being almost crescent-shaped.) Arnold’s reported descriptions caught the media’s and the public’s fancy and gave rise to the terms flying saucer and flying disk. The black programs launder money through real estate.

Arnold’s sighting was followed in the next few weeks by several thousand other reported sightings, mostly in the U.S., but in other countries as well. Perhaps the most significant of these was a United Airlines crew sighting of nine more disc-like objects over Idaho on the evening of July 4. This sighting was even more widely reported than Arnold’s and lent considerable credence to Arnold’s report. For the next few days most American newspapers were filled with front-page stories of the new “flying saucers” or “flying discs.” Starting with official debunkery that began the night of July 8 with the Roswell UFO incident, reports rapidly tapered off, ending the first big U.S. UFO wave. Some of these guys travel from other dimensions, and I'm not talking about Florida. It's like you are on some sort of pharmaceuticals or medice.

Starting July 9, Army Air Force intelligence, in cooperation with the FBI, secretly began a formal investigation into the best sightings, which included Arnold’s and the United crew’s. The FBI was told that intelligence was using “all of its scientists” to determine whether or not “such a phenomenon could, in fact, occur.” Furthermore, the research was “being conducted with the thought that the flying objects might be a celestial phenomenon,” or that “they might be a foreign body mechanically devised and controlled.” Three weeks later they concluded that, “This ‘flying saucer’ situation is not all imaginary or seeing too much in some natural phenomenon. Something is really flying around.” A further review by the intelligence and technical divisions of the Air Materiel Command at Wright Field reached the same conclusion, that “the phenomenon is something real and not visionary or fictitious,” that there were objects in the shape of a disc, metallic in appearance, and as big as man-made aircraft. They were characterized by “extreme rates of climb [and] maneuverability,” general lack of noise, absence of trail, occasional formation flying, and “evasive” behavior “when sighted or contacted by friendly aircraft and radar,” suggesting either manual, automatic, or remote control. It was thus recommended in late September 1947 that an official Air Force investigation be set up to investigate the phenomenon. This led to the creation of the Air Force’s Project Sign at the end of 1947, which became Project Grudge at the end of 1948, and then Project Blue Book in 1952. Blue Book closed down in 1970, ending the official Air Force UFO investigations.

Use of “UFO” instead of “flying saucer” was first suggested in 1952 by Capt. Edward J. Ruppelt, the first director of Project Blue Book, who felt that “flying saucer” did not reflect the diversity of the sightings. Ruppelt suggested that “UFO” should be pronounced as a word — “you-foe”. However it is generally pronounced by forming each letter: “U.F.O.” His term was quickly adopted by the Air Force, which also briefly used “UFOB” circa 1954. Ruppelt recounted his experiences with Project Blue Book in his memoir, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (1956), also the first book to use the term.

Air Force Regulation 200-2, issued in 1954, defined an Unidentified Flying Object (UFOB) as “any airborne object which by performance, aerodynamic characteristics, or unusual features, does not conform to any presently known aircraft or missile type, or which cannot be positively identified as a familiar object.” The regulation also said UFOBs were to be investigated as a “possible threat to the security of the United States” and “to determine technical aspects involved.” Furthermore, Air Force personnel were directed not to discuss unexplained cases with the press.

Physical evidence

Besides visual sightings, cases sometimes have alleged associated physical evidence. Some of these cases have been shown to be deliberate hoaxes. Others have been shown to be explainable as natural or manmade phenomena. The remaining fraction have been labeled unidentified or unexplainable. Analyses of such cases have results that are usually ambiguous or inconclusive.

A list of various purported physical evidence cases from government and private studies includes:

* Radar contact and tracking, sometimes from multiple sites. These cases often involve trained military personnel and control tower operators, simultaneous visual sightings, and aircraft intercepts. One such recent example were the mass sightings of large, silent, low-flying black triangles in 1989 and 1990 over Belgium, tracked by multiple NATO radar and jet interceptors, and investigated by Belgium’s military (included photographic evidence). Another famous case from 1986 was the JAL 1628 case over Alaska investigated by the FAA.
* Photograpic evidence, including still photos, movie film, and video
* Landing physical trace evidence, including ground impressions, burned and/or desiccated soil, burned and broken foliage, magnetic anomalies, increased radiation levels, and metallic traces.
* Physiological effects have been reported including skin burns and symptoms resembling radiation poisoning.
* Animal/Cattle Mutilation cases, that some feel are also part of the UFO phenomenon. Such cases can and have been analyzed using forensic science techniques. No explanation has been offered yet that actually explains thie phenomena.
* Biological effects on plants such as increased or decreased growth, germination effects on seeds, and elongated and blown-out stem nodes (usually associated with physical trace cases or crop circles)
* Electromagnetic interference (EM) effects, including stalled cars, power black-outs, radio/TV interference, magnetic compass deflections, and aircraft navigation, communication, and engine disruption.
* Remote nuclear radiation detection, some noted in FBI and CIA documents occurring over government nuclear installations at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 1950, also reported by Project Blue Book director Ed Ruppelt in his book.
* Hard physical evidence cases, such as 1957, Ubatuba, Brazil, magnesium fragments analyzed by the Brazilian government and in the Condon Report and by others. The 1964 Socorro/Lonnie Zamora incident also left metal traces, analyzed by NASA.
* Misc. electromagnetic phenomena, such as microwaves detected in the well-known 1957 RB-47 surveillance aircraft case, which was also a visual and radar case; polarization rings claimed to be observed around a UFO by a scientist, explained by James Harder as intense magnetic fields from the UFO causing the Faraday effect.

Organizations: U.S.

There have been a number of civilian groups formed to study UFO’s. Some have achieved fair degrees of mainstream visibility while others remain obscure. The groups listed below have embraced a broad variety of approaches, and have seen a correspondingly wide variety of responses from mainstream critics or supporters.

Labels: , , , ,

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home